Closer to the causal link of fat and atherosclerosis

[andyswarbs]

Medical Xpress: High-fat diet causes thickening of arteries down to the cellular level.

medicalxpress.com/news/2019...

[Cooper27]

"Ayee and Levitan fed mice either a normal well-balanced diet, or "western high fat diet" that was developed to mirror the levels of fat, protein, and carbohydrate typically found on a fast food menu."

So they compared a balanced diet to a junk food diet, and tell us this means all fat is bad?

We need to know what proportion of caloric intake fat made in each case, and we also need to see what proportion sugar made. Plus micronutrients matter too.

[andyswarbs in reply to Cooper27]

And because this was done on mice... I look forward to a randomised control trial on humans. Though of course the ethics of feeding humans a diet suspected of causing atherosclerosis would stop that, I guess.

[Cooper27 in reply to andyswarbs]

My point is that it's not a controlled study: the variable factor here wasn't just fat intake, it was the whole diet. A balanced diet would have involved vegetables, and a junk food diet probably wouldn't. A balanced diet probably got all sugar from fruit, a junk diet probably got it from sugar (and had higher levels of sugar to boot). We can't compare a completely different diet, and conclude that only one factor of that diet was the cause of all problems.

The controlled study is either a balanced diet with higher proportions of natural fat (e.g. avocado) or a high fat junk food diet Vs a low fat junk food diet.

[andyswarbs in reply to Cooper27]

Indeed, lots of problems.

[Hidden]

More and more people are waking up to facts that clearly show that natural fat is healthy. Always has been.

I don't think stuffing a tiny mice with fat is going to stay very healthy.

[andyswarbs in reply to Hidden]

What do you mean by natural fat?